MUSINGS : Don’t be a purse sentry

I realise I’m not a young lad anymore and I should never start my stories like this, but the hell with it, so here goes: I went to a club recently.

A club with loud music and a knot of gyrating bodies, thick like reeds in water. There were girls, loads and loads of girls with small tattoos of butterflies behind their ears and tattoos of Chinese inscriptions running down their legs. Girls who don’t look a day over 20 but who wear clothing so short it’s probably less than 20 inches in total.

You must be thinking, “Hang on, which club is this you went to?” I can’t say. But it’s a famous club in Dar, full of the middle-class and their plastic money and self-satisfied, entitled smirks. That was the first time I was going to a club in many, many years. I’m a pub kind of guy. I like something not too hectic where you can actually hear someone speak.

Anyhow. I saw this chap. He walked in with four striking girls. You know those guys, don’t you? They are always hanging out with lovely girls, which is the first sign that he isn’t having anything with any of them. They are just using him to reverse park or go to the bar and order drinks faster, or as a deterrent to other men who might want to bother them with overtures.

And really, you can understand a man like that. Maybe his dream has always been to surround himself with lovely women in short black dresses and to be seen in such company. People derive pleasure from so many things that you can’t understand but you should respect.

What I have a problem with is that in 2016, there are men who are taken to club to look after women’s purses and handbags and clutch purses, which is what that guy was doing. He looked about 37 or maybe 33. He could also have been 27 years old. It’s hard to tell now because most young people nowadays just eat junk and look like our uncles way before their time.

If it were up to me, I would have waited for him in the washrooms and told him not to waste the good years of his life playing purse sentry.

That it might not seem like it now, but when he’s perhaps 45 and he’s taking stock of the mistakes he made in life, he will look back at this moment, this dreadful moment when he’s babysitting these women and being called a nice guy, a sweet guy, a great guy, and he will wish he had made different choices than to look after purses when the girls are out dancing on the dance floor – with other men. Do you know what kind of guy is right up that list of men behaving badly with our purse sentry here? Men who carry their women’s purses in town. I have never understood how this is acceptable in a real world. And I sometimes I suspect women use that purse thing to test how your manhood is calibrated.

You will be walking in town and suddenly they stop and say, “Babe, ebu hold this for me for a second,” then they adjust their hat or shoe straps or something and when they are done, they just keep walking like they never owned a purse in their lives and you have the option of walking next to her with that purse or leaving it on top of the next parked until she turns and asks, “where is my bag?”

Talking of which. There should never be a reason to go into a woman’s purse. Even if she asks you to fetch loose change for parking. Let her do it.